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APEX 5 New Package Features

To get a proper list of the new packages and API's APEX 5 provides us, we have to wait for the documentation of course. But if you're impatient and want to now more, you can get a list of all package procedures and functions by running this SQL on the APEX 5 Early Adopter instance:

You'll get a list of over 700 procedures/functions. Most should look familiar. But there are some new kids on the block like : APEX_JSON, APEX_SPATIAL and APEX_ZIP.

You can examine the ALL_SOURCE view to get more insight by looking at the parameters and the examples in the comments.

The APEX_ZIP package is - according to the comments in the package - based on the work of Anton Scheffer (see this blog post). The functions / procedures can be used to zip and upload a file or to download and unzip a file.

The APEX_SPATIAL package enables you to use the Oracle Locator and Spatial Option within APEX. I am not sure whether one of the functions in that package actually require a Spatial Option license - and if you can easily violate the (absence of that) license by calling such a function "by accident". Maybe one of the Oracle people can shine a light on this - always tricky - subject!

The APEX_JSON package finally, is used for generating and parsing JSON with PL/SQL. As an example - more or less "borrowed" from Morten Braten's post :

This feature can be very handy when you want to generate JSON as a source for one of the many Javascript charting libraries that usually need data in this format. Or - the other way around - when a call to an ORDS Web Service returns JSON and you need to display the results somewhere on a page.

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